To those in India this is no big news.
Here we have special groups assigned with the job of collecting the used water bottles from Railway stations ,Bus Terminals and Cinema halls.
These then are sold in bulk to middlemen who then sell them to Bottled Water manufacturers.
They label tap water with out treating it as Mineral Water at exorbitant price.
The crime branch of Gurgaon police has busted a gang which used to supply fake mineral water bottles that were being sold under Pepsico India Ltd’s brand name, Aquafina. Police have arrested seven persons in this connection and four vehicles loaded with fake bottled water, wrappers and duplicate bottles have been seized.
An FIR has been lodged under Sections 420/467/468 of the IPC and the Copyright Act at the Badshapur police station. According to police, officials from Pepsico India Ltd met police officers and gave a complaint against some people who were running a plant of fake bottled water and selling them under their company’s name. A crime branch team of Sector 46 police then conducted raids at Samaspur, Vajirabad and Islampur village, where the accused were filling borewell water into the fake bottles and supplying them throughout the city.”
“Supermarkets are selling bottled tap water to millions of unsuspecting customers.
Bottles of Tesco ‘Everyday Value Still Water’ and Asda ‘Smartprice Still Water’ are sitting on shelves alongside big brands of mineral water such as Evian and Perrier.
However, there is no explanation on the label of these supermarket brands that the contents are simply tap water.
On the face of it, the supermarket water, which costs 17p for a two-litre bottle, offers remarkable value compared with the big brands. In reality it is no more than a filtered version of the mains water that comes out of the tap at a cost of just a third of a penny a litre.
This means the supermarkets and their suppliers are enjoying a mark-up of around 2,500 per cent for filtering the water – something the mains suppliers say is unnecessary. They then put it into plastic bottles and ship it to thousands of stores across the country.
It echoes one of the best-loved episodes of the BBC’s Only Fools and Horses, featuring David Jason as the entrepreneurial Del Boy, of Trotters Independent Traders.
In pursuit of his millionaire dreams, Del came up with the idea of bottling tap water and selling it as the exclusive ‘Peckham Spring’. Just as Del Boy failed to mention the tap water origins of Peckham Spring, so Tesco and Asda have left this important detail off their labels.
Tesco sells the filtered mains water under the name of Everyday Value Still Water which can be bought in a two-litre bottle for 17p or six 500ml bottles for £1. On the label it says ‘Just water, nothing added’. There is a carbonated version which also sells for 17p.”